I spent 45 minutes this morning desmegmafying three new Xbox 360 controllers, three new Wii controllers, a Wii charger, and a bunch of videogames. Thanks to everyone that suggested Wii and Xbox 360 games to me – BioShock ate my morning (after I got the controllers out of their packages.) My experience reminded me of Mark Cuban’s brilliant post from 2006 titled Seagate Leaves me bloody… My right index finger is now sliced, my left palm has a cut on it, and my left index finger is still bleeding a little – five hours later. But I’ve liberated the controllers from their plastic jail, inserted the batteries, and gotten my butt kicked at Wii Table Tennis.

As my Quixotic adventure for abolishing software patents continues, I’m starting to come across essays, examples, and suggestions from software engineers that support and confirm my point of view. Terry Gold of Gold Systems pointed me to an article from Art Reisman, the CEO / CTO at APConnections. Terry is on Art’s advisory board. Let’s start with Art’s recommendation Patents should be allowed for: 1) devices with mechanical components 2) physical compounds that can be weighed on a scale. Patents should never be awarded to: 1) Ideas 2) processes, recipes, software programs I believe that these already have other appropriate means of protection (trade secrets, copyrights).

Creating companies from scratch is really difficult. Every successful entrepreneur knows the daily challenges and struggles that conspire against him. Sometimes the entrepreneur thinks to himself “there must be an easier way.” A long time friend and successful entrepreneur – Steve Munroe – provides a creative solution. I don’t know if I ever explained to you my premise for a business model whose main goal is to own a business that squelches the entrepreneurial drive. It is called Just Gas, the premise being that I would buy a Marina on the lake and just sell gas, nothing else. By naming the business Just Gas, it would force me to not expand into other areas, or maybe leave enough room on the sign so you could expand after a couple of years and sell Ice also, thus: Just Gas and Ice. But that’s it. The focus would force the expansion, entrepreneurial part of the brain to shut down, thus decreasing stress and increasing quality of life. That’s the premise.

The massive proliferation of web services, their corresponding APIs, and the notion that “the web is the platform” has caused me to spend a lot of time in what I call “horizontal land.” This is a special place where software that nits everything together (sometimes nicely, sometimes not so nicely) lives. Our RSS theme and corresponding investments (FeedBurner, NewsGator, and Technorati) arose from one aspect of this problem. Shortly after I started thinking about the implicit web several years ago I hooked up with Eric Norlin. We bounced a bunch of thoughts around and Eric proposed the idea for what became the Defrag Conference. We had the first one in 2007 – I thought it was superb as did a bunch of other people. As a result, we are doing it again in 2008.

I love a good rant. I got one several months ago from Janet Stites in reaction to a post I wrote about financial projections. I asked her if I could publish it and she said “yup.” Here it is. Janet’s thoughts are her own and come from her experience, but I thought her perspective on entrepreneurship and VC’s was a useful perspective to ruminate on. Dear Brad: I’m Janet Stites, cofounder/ former publisher of AlleyCat News now founder/publisher of Talent Pool New [east]. I came across your posting on the issue of projections always being wrong and how you mentioned (in a small way) the value of creating a business which scales. I wish you could open this dialogue on a larger basis with VCs and particularly early stage investors because one’s company can go under while taking the time to create these models. If VCs, early stage and particularly angel investors, would begin to ask for the revenue model, price point, universe of the market, competitive advantage and, from there, try to ascertain how flexible & creative, in terms of tweaking the b-model, the entrepreneur might be if the market changes, war starts, economy falters. Investors might see a lot better deal flow in terms of quality and management in terms of tenacity and the entrepreneur might be able to avoid having to walk away from a potentially great company because his/her credit line has run out…spouse left…child starts college (I remember when the founders of iVillage thought, in 1995, chat was their model and TheStreet.com, thought, in 1996, they would make their fortune off of subscriptions.).

I’m looking for a new running log. I’ve been using Cool Running as my log. They were bought by Active sometime last year. Last month Active discontinued Cool Running and migrated all the data to Active Trainer. I was optimistic that Active had thought this through, as I like the Active folks and think they’ve generally done a great job integrating their acquisitions. To my great disappointment, I discovered that Active Trainer stinks. Cool Running was 95% of what I wanted to track my running. Active Trainer is maybe 50%. Clunky UI, missing data, hard to get at summary information, and a generally crummy user experience.

Amy and I are proud to announce that we’ve completed the fundraising for Boulder Building New Orleans. Our goal was to raise $50,000 to fund a high quality / low cost house in New Orleans for someone displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Due to the generosity of many of our friends in Boulder (and several from outside Boulder), we’ve accomplished this goal. The Community Foundation Serving Boulder County was instrumental in helping us manage this effort. Thanks to everyone involved! Following is the press release that the Community Foundation issued last month.

One of Kenai and Brooks’ favorite thing to do is to destroy any dog toy we give them. Apparently Micah Baldwin’s dogs have the same tendencies (as does my brothers dog Nevada, although she only goes after the dog squeaky things inside the toys.) I guess most dogs enjoy death and destruction of toys (presumably that’s one of the drivers for the rapidly expanding dog toy industry – one of my 2008 predictions is that the dog toy industry will surpass the cat toy industry.) To address this issue, we decided to get Kenai and Brooks a giant granite brick for Christmas this year.

Ah – it’s the 2008 tech predictions time again. Mark Andreessen has a hilarious post dissecting the Economists 2008 tech predictions titled When non-technologists write about technology … They’re so CUTE! Mark’s commentary is brilliant and has much more useful information than the predictions. I predict 2008 will be the year that bloggers decimate all the 2008 tech predictions and reveal their fundamental flaws. Hey Mark, can you take on the Read/WriteWeb 2008 Web Predictions next?